Merit and diversity are not contrasting ambitions for any organisation worthy of a future
The USA is recalibrating while the rest of us look on, waiting to see whether politicians and business leaders around the world will stand firm or get swept along. It’s a particularly anxious time for those who are responsible for and benefit from DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs. Will their organisations be an Accenture or an Apple? And will they pit merit against diversity as if they are not interconnected imperatives?
As the majority of people are subject to at least one form of prejudice — people who also know that fairness is not a given without protections in place — I think it would be foolish of leaders to assume that they can put the genie back in the bottle. People impacted by discrimination also make up the majority of potential employees and customers, so how organisations plan to be relevant with non-diverse leaders reverting to bad proxy decision-making is beyond me. Other than bowing to political pressure, it seems to be based on a misty-eyed belief that prior to a push for diversity there was a magical time in which all recruitment and promotions were purely merit-based, not subject to bias at all, which is a fantastical belief born of the childish egotism of the few.
Saying that, while so many have forged a new and effective path, I am certain that there are DEI programs that have been poorly implemented and have failed as a consequence, mostly those that were born of prejudicial thinking to begin with. So many ‘women in leadership’ courses did little to address diversity. They just sent a message that you can come from a different demographic but you must be trained to maintain the status quo if you want to be successful, mostly resulting in even more people emulating behaviours that were detrimental to begin with. Occasionally such programs are so disingenuous and accusatory that they lose focus of their purpose, which is to impel everyone to invest in progression, not just to be virtuous. They even give those of us who are supposed to be beneficiaries the ick.
Merit has always been subjective
Something that is true of all humans is that we are raised with the concept of good vs bad, from stories we are told as children to the rules we are told to adopt as we grow. How we evaluate good and bad varies, but our instincts to reward the good and punish the bad are imprinted.
This means we are unlikely to give up on the pursuit of meritocracy, regardless of how subjective we are in evaluating it.
After years of research to inform How We Talk About Work and How We Talk About Leadership, I know that people don’t subscribe to one reality of who and what should be rewarded. Most significantly, we have different opinions when it comes to those deserving of leadership — some people are attracted to extroversion and charisma, others to deep thinkers who are cautious with their words, others to people from the same demographic. Some people think hard work means working long hours, while others think it’s about how much focussed and accurate thinking people contribute. Some think meeting expectations is good, others think it is about changing expectations. The list goes on and on. The Idiosyncratic Rater Effect and other identified biases provide evidence of how easy it is for people to be subjective when evaluating others.
Rethinking meritocracy
I wrote The Meritocracy Manifesto over five years ago to propose an approach to being inclusive and pursuing excellence at the same time. The premise is that unless you start to transparently evaluate the actual work that you do, activity by activity, and change what behaviours and skills you reward, you can’t create a merit-based system fit for a diverse world.
What I’ve observed over time is that creating a meritorious organisation is less about what organisations measure than whether they are radically honest about what they measure, that they apply that measurement consistently and that there are proof points everyone understands and can learn.
For example, if organisations are actually promoting people because of likability, they better make sure that likability is on a transparent evaluation matrix, they can explain what it is, why it is important to the organisation, how it is objectively measured and how it can be learned. You can bet that the organisations scrapping their DEI initiatives in favour of ’meritocracy’ won’t be doing this at all.
In fact, it is likely they will revert to the personal preferences of their leaders, which has nothing to do with meritocracy and everything to do with maintaining the status quo, and that makes them unfit for the future or operating in a world that the majority of us inhabit every day.
